Randal Rauser

Home of progressively evangelical, generously orthodox, rigorously analytic, revolutionary Christian thinking (that's what I'm aiming for anyway)

genocide

What Happened When Christians Stopped Allegorizing Canaan?

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During the Reformation, Protestants widely rejected the allegorized interpretations of the Canaanite genocide that had become de rigueur since Origen. With that safeguard gone, it was not long before they were appealing to Joshua to justify their own genocides. To illustrate, here is a passage from Philip Jenkins, Laying Down the Sword: And don’t think […]

William Lane Craig Says God May Command Us to “Drive Out Canaanites” in Our Day. I Respond.

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Reasonable Faith just posted a short video from William Lane Craig in which the esteemed apologist defends the prospect that God may command Christians today to target people groups in the same way that the ancient Israelites targeted the Canaanites for extermination. In this video, I provide a response. ?

Quick Replies to William Lane Craig’s Bad Talking Points on the Canaanite Genocide

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William Lane Craig has made truly impressive contributions to a range of deep philosophical and theological topics. His defense of biblical atrocities like the Canaanite genocide is a notable exception. In this article, I offer some responses to excerpts from his response to a listener question about the Canaanite genocide. Craig says: “The slaughter of […]

The Extraordinary Evil of Dehumanizing Rhetoric Against the Canaanites

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Today, I was reading commentaries on Proverbs 20:30, a verse which commends physically beating people as a way to inculcate wisdom and goodness in them: “Blows and wounds scrub away evil, and beatings purge the inmost being.” (Imagine how much pain and anguish has been inflicted on people as those in power cauterized their feelings […]

The Treatment of the Canaanites is Unique and Unrepeatable? Rebutting a Popular Genocide Apologetic

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One of the common gambits of the Christian apologists who defend the Canaanite genocide is to insist that the narrative does not provide a general justification for genocide because the circumstances were “unique and unrepeatable”. (For example, that is a description I have heard Paul Copan use on different occasions.) The statement seems to have […]

Frank Turek on the Slaughter of the Canaanites. And My Response.

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The perfectly awful apologetic defense of the Canaanite slaughter in this clip concisely captures why I wrote Jesus Loves Canaanites. Let’s begin with the video (it’s only six minutes). I’ll then post my commentary below. ? The video begins with a question posed by the moderator of what appears to be an in-church training event. […]

Driving Out the Canaanites? On a failed attempt to re-brand biblical genocide

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The heart and foundation of Christianity is belief in a God who is worthy of worship: in the words of Anselm, that being than which none greater can be conceived. And so, when the Bible depicts God as acting in a manner that appears to be less-than-perfect, this creates a challenge for the Christian reader. […]

Is abortion a genocide?

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Dear fellow Pro-Lifers, Please do not refer to support for elective abortion as a “genocide”. The word “genocide” has a specific meaning in international law: it refers to the attempt to destroy an ethnic, religious, or cultural identity. To be sure, genocidaires may use abortion as a means to destroy an ethnic, religious and/or cultural […]

Special Pleading or Therapy? The J. Warner Wallace Dilemma

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Popular Christian apologists have a problem. On the one hand, they are strident defenders of objective moral knowledge, often to the end of defending a moral argument for God’s existence. On the other hand, they defend readings of the violence portrayed in the Bible that appear inconsistent with that aforementioned commitment to objective moral knowledge. […]